Mobile services, such as providing content to mobile devices by means of SMS, MMS or some other messaging system, have become very popular. However provision of such services may be challenging for a content provider. Producing content/services suitable for mobile environment often requires knowledge of telecom specific technologies. Alternatively some special purpose interfaces may be used, but such interfaces may be expensive to develop and challenging to maintain. Thus, there may be a technical and/or a financial barrier to produce mobile content/services.
FIG. 1 shows an example system illustrating some prior art solutions, which may be used for providing mobile services. The services are provided from a service provider system 101 to a mobile device 102 of an end user through a network operator system 104. The network operator system may provide communication services to mobile devices for example through a GSM network or a WCDMA network. The network operator system 104 provides an interface 105 for service provider system for providing mobile services through the network operator system. The interface 105 may be for example a WSI (Web Services Interface) interface, a CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) interface, a HTTP/XML (HyperText Transfer Protocol/eXtended Markup Language) interface, a legacy SMSC/MMSC (Short Message Service Centre/Multimedia Message Service Centre) protocol interface, etc. WSI, for example, is a powerful tool for providing various types of services, but it may be difficult to use especially to persons who do not have computer programming skills. Additionally there are many vendors specific flavours of WSI, whereby a content provider may need to know various different interfaces. Similar challenges may apply to other known interfaces.
One available option for making provision of mobile services easier is to have additional computer program modules 107 and 108 in the network operator system and in the service provider system. The program modules are designed to communicate with each other. The program module in the service provider system 101 may have an additional user interface 110 to be used by the service provider. Development of such content providing system comprised of additional program code modules is however expensive. Moreover such content providing system is typically network operator specific and thus the service provider cannot use the same system with different network operators. Thereby, if the service provider wants to provide the service to subscribers of various different network operators, the service provider may need to use various different content providing systems.
Thus there is a need to further develop mechanisms for providing services through communication networks.